Related Application
A related application is entitled "IMAGE RECOGNITION AUDIENCE MEASUREMENT SYSTEM AND METHOD", U.S. Pat. No. 4,858,000, filed Sept. 14,1988 the same date as the present application by the present inventor Daozheng Lu and assigned to the same assignee.
A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to image recognition systems, and more particularly to image recognition systems and methods for use with television audience measurement and marketing data collection systems.
B. Description of the Prior Art
Manual systems for determining the viewing/listening habits of the public are prone to inaccuracies resulting from the entry of erroneous data that may be intentionally or unintentionally entered and are slow in acquiring data.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,056,135 to Currey et al. issued Sept. 25, 1962 and assigned to the same assignee as the present application describes a method and apparatus for automatically determining the listening habits of wave signal receiver users The method disclosed in Currey et al. provides a record of the number and types of persons using a wave signal receiver by monitoring the operational conditions of the receiver and utilizing both strategically placed switches for counting the number of persons entering, leaving and within a particular area and a photographic recorder for periodically recording the composition of the audience A mailable magazine provides a record of both the audience composition and the receiver operation information for manual processing by a survey organization. Thus a disadvantage is that acquiring data is slow and further many viewing audience members object to being identified from the photographic record.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,644,509 to Kiewit el al. issued Feb. 17, 1987 and assigned to the same assignee as the present application discloses an ultrasonic, pulse-echo method and apparatus for determining the number of persons in the audience and the composition of the audience of a radio receiver and/or a television receiver. First and second reflected ultrasonic wave maps of the monitored area are collected, first without people and second with people who maybe present in the monitored area. The first collected background defining map is subtracted from the second collected map to obtain a resulting map. The resulting map is processed to identify clusters having a minimum intensity. A cluster size of the thus identified clusters is utilized to identify clusters corresponding to people in an audience. While this arrangement is effective for counting viewing audience members, individual audience members can not be identified.
Various image recognition arrangements and systems are known for recognizing patterns within a captured video image. However, the conventional pattern recognition systems are impractical and uneconomical for identifying individual audience members of a viewing audience due to the vast information storage and computing requirements that would be needed in the conventional systems It is desirable to provide an image recognition system having the capability to identify individual members of the viewing audience.